1. < Message from the Chair

This year marked an important milestone in our department as we concluded our transformative tenure as LEADERS of the leadership and operations center of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). This term-limited role has been housed in multiple academic medical centers since its inception by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1987. This center was housed in the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM) for 7 years between 2018 and 2025. Our service in this role not only contributed to improving our understanding of HIV outcomes but directly led to the development of new therapies for treating and preventing HIV. The award elevated our stature in research, not only in the DoM, but for the entire UCLA community. It also led to the development of many successful clinician leaders in HIV care and prevention — and, importantly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, our leadership provided critical support for testing and deploying life-saving treatments that helped to transform its course. The many inspiring stories from this time exemplify all aspects of the DoM’s strategic plan to Lead in Innovation, Transform Care and Advance Health for All. Join me in looking back at and celebrating the impact of our leadership of the ACTG.

The ACTG Legacy

In 1981, an immunologist at UCLA named Michael Gottlieb, MD published a case report describing five young patients who were suffering from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a severe lung infection that is most common in people who are immunocompromised. It was the world’s first scientific publication on what would come to be known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, and would ultimately lead to the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

UCLA housed the ACTG LOC from 2018 through December 1, 2025. Over that period a team of research administrators managed the distribution of over $45 million annually — the largest grant in the university’s history. It was also a historic first for the ACTG: Never before had a public institution served as the LOC.

This was a massive undertaking that from the outset required exceptional efficiency, outstanding leadership and, above all, teamwork.

“Research really is a team sport, and I think that’s something that doesn’t get enough recognition,” said Dr. Currier, who serves as executive vice chair for research in the DoM and co-principal investigator (PI) of the UCLA AIDS Treatment and Prevention Clinical Trials Unit. “We had an incredible team — including my colleagues at UCLA, within the infectious diseases division and at the UCLA CARE Center as well as the incredible staff of the LOC — who performed exceptional work."

The ACTG Comes to UCLA

The ACTG network consists of 65 sites across four continents. UCLA’s unit within the network, the five-site UCLA AIDS Treatment and Clinical Trials Unit, has been part of the ACTG since its inception.

Given the size of the ACTG and the scope of its studies, running the network is a formidable task. Dr. Currier was elected in 2011 by her peers — the PIs of all the clinical trial units within the ACTG — to become the network’s vice chair, a position that would see her ascend to the role of chair when the LOC moved from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to UCLA in 2018. Prior to her election, not everyone was convinced that the network’s leadership hub could be run efficiently from a public institution.

“When I first decided to try to throw my hat into the ring to run to be the chair of the ACTG, a lot of people were saying, ‘Are you sure that you can do this at a public institution?’,” she recalled. Their biggest concern was the distribution of subawards — grants that pass through an institution to be distributed to approved recipients who carry out the work — from UCLA to its clinical trials sites. These funds are used to pay for trial enrollments, salaries of trial site staff, lab studies and more.

"There was concern about whether we could do that quickly enough at UCLA, with the staffing and the infrastructure of the institution,” Dr. Currier said. “I didn't go into this lightly.”

“There was such a strong commitment to making this work from the DGSOM dean’s office and across UCLA,” Dr. Currier said. “I really thank Marcia for her leadership in making that happen and having that vision to see how something that had operated at a private institution could function in a public institution.”

Behind the Scenes, In the Seams

Success would require using some funds from the ACTG grant to carefully build a team that learned quickly, communicated well and felt energized by solving problems. The new staff would also need to be positioned throughout relevant offices in UCLA beyond the DoM — such as within the UCLA Office of Contract and Grant Administration, which oversees grants for research throughout the institution, and in the purchasing department.

“One of the things we really thought about was how to avoid overtaxing the systems that were already in place, so we had people embedded in other parts of the institution to manage our grant and make sure that things ran smoothly,” Dr. Currier recalled. “We didn’t try to pile this on to the existing infrastructure and say, ‘Okay, now we have to get 374 subawards out, and everyone has to get paid within 30 days of submitting their invoices.’ We set it up ahead of time to make it work.”

Current Chief Administrative Officer Yanina Venegas, who then served as interim executive director of the DoM as well as division administrator for hematology-oncology, helped Dr. Currier identify candidates.

“We had to make sure that everything was aligned with the new platform, but also keep the integrity of this grant, and it was a huge undertaking,” she said. “My team had no idea how we were going to do it at first, but we figured it out as a team, and I’m really proud of that.”

In addition to serving as a “bank” for the ACTG’s clinical trials sites, as Licet put it, the LOC also managed the network’s single Institutional Review Board (IRB), an administrative body that ensures the safety of study subjects.

“That was new for UCLA, and we had to come up with a process and workflow for it,” Licet said. The LOC also managed ACTG communications, including its social media and newsletter.

A Once-In-a-Lifetime Crisis

Just as the team was finding its rhythm — and only a year after it had submitted a request for the ACTG grant to be renewed — they encountered a far bigger foe: the rise of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

On one hand, a global pandemic involving a novel virus was the kind of challenge that could exploit any operational weaknesses within an institution, threatening its existence. On the other, it is also the kind of challenge that birthed the ACTG in the first place — and one for which immunology scientists, especially at a place with a history like UCLA’s, are well-prepared.

“Infectious disease specialist physicians prepare for pandemics like COVID-19 for our entire careers, never knowing if it’s going to happen in our lifetime or not,” Dr. Landovitz said. “It really is sort of the Super Bowl for infectious disease physicians — you prepare for it, you train for it, but you don’t know if you’re ever going to get to play in that event.”

In fact, ACTG network members had long discussed how they might respond in the event that an unforeseen pandemic required large-scale clinical trials. The organization’s applications for federal funding included commitments to offer their resources to meet new needs should the worst-case scenario occur.

Now, it had. First, to ensure current trial subjects’ safety, Dr. Currier, her team and the network PIs worked together to figure out which studies could be paused and which had to carry on so patients could continue their investigational treatments. For those that could not be stopped, the researchers came up with plans to efficiently mail participants their medications and conduct follow-up visits over Zoom.

Then came the call to help. In May 2020, the U.S. government launched a large-scale COVID-19 therapeutics effort titled Operation Warp Speed (OWS). It asked the ACTG to conduct clinical trials of outpatient treatments and to contribute to enrolling participants in vaccine trials and other prevention strategies, granting the network considerable resources from OWS to do so. From concept to first participant enrollment, the network’s COVID-19 outpatient platform study took just two and a half months to launch. The UCLA CARE Center site of the UCLA AIDS Prevention and Treatment Clinical Trials Unit was one of the first trial sites to enroll participants — a success that was made possible by in part by the exceptional leadership of UCLA infectious diseases faculty member Kara Chew, MD, MS, who serves as the site’s clinical research site leader and director of the UCLA-CDU Center for AIDS Research Clinical Science Core.

Dr. Currier had never seen things move so quickly at UCLA.

“The pace of those studies was truly extraordinary. It was incredible,” Dr. Currier said. The timing for getting contracts approved and getting things moving, everybody was doing all they could to speed this along. And it really paid off.”

Profound LEADERship

Dr. Landovitz assisted Dr. Currier in preparing the UCLA AIDS Treatment and Prevention Clinical Trial Unit to participate in COVID-19 studies. He recalled when they needed to figure out how to safely conduct research involving individuals who were ill with SARS-CoV-2 in the same area as people with HIV who were profoundly immunocompromised. She came up with the idea to convert moving pods into standalone exam rooms; the one at the UCLA CARE Center in Beverly Hills remains today.

“It was really a moment of ingenuity that demonstrated forward thinking and collaboration and strategizing across disciplines in a way that I don’t think anybody ever imagined,” he said. He added that much of the success of the ACTG and the UCLA trials unit during this time should be credited to her leadership.

“It was an unthinkable task. Judy steered incredibly the hard-working, forward-thinking administrative group that oversaw all of that work here at UCLA and within the UCLA systems,” Dr. Landovitz recalled. “They stepped up in a truly remarkable, collaborative way."

To Jeanette, her team’s performance during a period of “collective confusion” was one of the proudest points of her career so far.

“We didn't develop the COVID-19 trials, of course, because none of us are doctors, but we had to develop all of the organization, all of the budgets, all of the background that's not really seen, and we had to do it in record time,” Jeanette said. “And we did it. We came together at a time when nothing made sense, and we made it happen.”

The LOC also expanded over the period it was based at UCLA, starting with three members when it began and ending with 10 by the time it moved to UNC at the end of last year. Nearly everyone stayed all seven years — a rare figure at a time when the national average for job tenure tends to be closer to four years. Dr. Currier points to Licet as a key player in building out a strong team with staying power, as she ensured that everyone involved understood the ACTG's impact and where their contribution fit in.

“Her leadership was incredible,” Dr. Currier said. “People just came to this work with a commitment to wanting to be part of something that they could understand and feel like they were a part of. I think people really felt a personal connection to what they were doing, especially during COVID.”

The team’s longevity is a point of pride for Licet.

“I think the fact that I was able to keep the team intact to the very end in itself is a success, because everyone knew when they took on roles that this was a temporary, seven-year project that would move to another institution,” she said. As the grant’s time at UCLA came to an end, she worked with every member of the team to help them find new roles.

“We were on the administrative side of things, but I felt like our work really carried a lot of value,” Jeanette said. “Working with a community of people who have this shared connection of just wanting to help people was really special, as was working for a network that not only literally saves lives but improves the quality of life for those within it. It's such an honor, and I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of it.”

Toward the Future

When Dr. Currier reflects on her time leading the ACTG, she is deeply proud of how the LOC managed the pandemic and of the groundbreaking science that emerged from the network during her time at its helm — study results that reshaped guidelines for prescribing heart-protecting drugs to patients with HIV, for instance, and found that injectable long-acting medications were effective in patients who struggle to take oral HIV medications. She is also thankful to the network’s community partners who volunteered their time to serve on protocol teams, scientific committees and even the ACTG’s executive committee. Thanks to changes implemented under her leadership, they will now be paid for their efforts.

Dr. Currier feels that her experience taught her that building a team is something one cannot take for granted. She also feels she improved in her ability to delegate tasks to others and trust that people would understand their role and how to do the work.

“When you have a committed group of people, you can accomplish so much,” she said.

Jeanette agrees.

“Having people who are committed and really care makes all the difference,” she said. “You can teach people the ropes, but it’s really up to them at the end of the day whether they want to carry that knowledge and really put effort into it.”

For Licet, the experience of being the LOC’s executive director taught her to stay calm and focused in the face of a crisis.

“Those seven years prepared me to take a look at the problem or challenge at hand and really try to resolve it, because there will always be a solution,” she said.

Dr. Currier emphasized that even with all of the lessons learned since the LOC came to UCLA, the past year’s disruptions to federal scientific funding were highly destabilizing.

She added that she hopes that research conducted by the ACTG will not be left behind in the wake of new national priorities, because there is much more work required to bring the HIV epidemic to an end.

“We have a lot of tools, and we’ve made a lot of progress, but we’re not done yet,” Dr. Currier said. “I really hope that there continues to be an investment in ending the epidemic and improving the lifespan of people who are living with HIV — and that we don’t stop too soon.”

I am deeply proud of all the phenomenal LEADERS at every level who made this project so successful. I would especially like to acknowledge the research administrators within the LOC who were critical to its success:

Here is another fantastic picture of the whole team, this time at the 2023 ACTG Leadership Retreat.

Licet and Dr. Currier both shared that they were particularly grateful for the help of Mary Haskins and Ummi Sayers from the UCLA Office of Contracts and Grants Administration and to UCLA Office of Extramural Fund Management members Ruth Hwang, Maribel Gomez and Duy Dang, who sadly passed away in 2025. These were the research team’s main contacts in those offices and were essential to their work. The LOC team would also like to acknowledge their colleagues in the UCLA Department of Pediatrics, Grace M. Aldrovandi, MD and Kathie Grovit Ferbas, PhD, who lead the Laboratory Center that supports the ACTG.

LATITUDE Study Shows Long-Acting Medication Works for HIV in Patients Who Have Struggled to Take Oral Medication

Among the many high-impact studies to come out of the ACTG during the period that the grant was led by UCLA was a clinical trial called LATITUDE, which studied the efficacy of a long-acting injectable HIV medication “cocktail” in patients who were unable to consistently take daily oral medication. The results, which were published in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, were so impressive that the study was stopped early so all enrolled patients could get access to the injectable medication regimen.

“This study really changed the paradigm of how we use these drugs,” Raphael J. Landovitz, MD, co-principal investigator of the UCLA AIDS Treatment and Prevention Clinical Trials Unit and a senior author on the study, said. The paper is the result of an intensely collaborative effort that, in addition to UCLA, involved investigators at ACTG clinical research sites across the U.S.

The medications tested in the study, a combination of cabotegravir plus rilpivirine, are a form of antiretroviral therapy (ART). ART works by suppressing replication of HIV to levels that prevent HIV infection from progressing to AIDS and, when also suppressed to undetectable levels, prevent people from being contagious to sexual partners. Fully-suppressive ART regimens suppress the virus and have returned life expectancy for people with HIV to near normal.

For years the cocktail was only available as pills that had to be taken daily to be effective, but in 2021 the Food and Drug Administration approved an injectable version of the cocktail that only needed to be injected into the buttocks once every one or two months. However, the initial approval for the drug limited its use to patients who already had no issue taking oral medications as prescribed and had already achieved full viral suppression.

“Of course, the people who stood to benefit the most from an entirely injectable regimen are the people who can’t stick with the daily oral pills — and therefore probably weren’t virally suppressed,” Dr. Landovitz explained.

To expand the drug’s indicated patient population to include those who needed it most, ACTG sites across the U.S. ran a 10-year-long study involving more than 400 participants who could or would not adhere to daily oral ART. The researchers behind the study were not surprised that the injectable successfully suppressed HIV, but they were surprised at the magnitude of the response. Additionally, while the study protocol required that people had full viral suppression in order to be eligible for treatment randomization, 20% of them did not.

“That implies that these results are even more broadly applicable and generalizable,” Dr. Landovitz said.

The next goal of this research is to expand the use-context of injectable ART to make the injectables accessible to even more patients. The scientists who took part in the project are working on ways to extend the time between injections to six or even 12 months, as well as to potentially allow self-administration that does not require the presence of a provider as is currently the case. They also want to make injectables more affordable and widely available for those who want or need them.

Key Smallpox Drug is Not Effective Against Mpox, ACTG Study Finds

On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2022 came the rise of mpox, a virus that is related to smallpox but tends to be milder and is less often fatal. Many in the field hoped that tecovirimat — a drug that had promising initial results against mpox in animal models— might be useful too. However, the data in humans was lacking.

“This created a huge demand for treatment in a setting where we did not even know if the drug worked,” Judith S. Currier, MD , co-principal investigator of the UCLA AIDS Prevention and Treatment Clinical Trials Unit, said. In her role as chair of the ACTG at the time, Dr. Currier helped secure funding for the ACTG to launch a trial to test tecovirimat that established that the drug is in fact not effective against mpox. The UCLA CARE Center, under the leadership of Raphael J. Landovitz, MD enrolled the first participant into this trial. Their findings were published Feb. 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The results were surprising to people, but there are other studies that have found the same thing subsequently,” Dr. Currier said.

Dr. Currier and others on her team appealed to the National Institutes of Health and the ACTG’s partners at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease for funds to conduct the study after witnessing mpox’s impact in their clinics. The ACTG network received the funding to do so in August 2022, and in just 18 days, a team of investigators from across the country developed a final protocol and launched the trial using some key learnings from their experience with COVID-19 to do so.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, pregnant women and children were left behind in terms of the timing of their involvement in many of the trials, and in this case, we wanted to do a study that involved everybody at the same time,” she recalled. That resulted in a randomized comparison of tecovirimat compared to placebo in people with mild to moderate disease; only pregnant women and children included in a separate analysis of the drug’s pharmacokinetics and other outcomes, as opposed to the full study population.

“Everybody wants to answer every question they can think of when they do a clinical trial, because it's such an incredible opportunity,” Dr. Currier said. “But sometimes, if you pile on too many things, the whole thing sinks. We realized that we could answer the primary question about tecovirimat’s efficacy without studying every variable in every participant.”

The research team also leveraged what they had learned from COVID-19 to enroll people remotely if they did not live in close proximity to a trial site. They shipped the drug to people with documented evidence of mpox then followed up with them over video. Ultimately, remote enrollment enabled them to include 412 subjects, with patients based in both the U.S. and Brazil.

“The fact that we were able to see that the drug wasn’t effective was a major contribution to the field, but so was the fact that we were able to do the study so rapidly and to apply some of the things we learned from COVID,” Dr. Currier said. The field subsequently refocused its attention on finding alternative treatments as a result, she noted.

“’Negative studies’ are just as important as ones that show drugs work, especially in the setting of an outbreak.” Dr. Currier said.

I could not agree more, Dr. Currier! Congratulations to all.

Happy Belated National Doctors’ Day!

Last Monday, March 30, was National Doctors’ Day. One day is not enough to adequately thank our phenomenal physicians for the countless hours that they dedicate to our research, education and patient care missions, and we are fortunate to have the best of the best working and training here at UCLA. I am constantly inspired by your talent, skill and passion for what you do, and am deeply grateful to be your colleague!

Dale

P.S.

Last weekend, I traveled to Washington D.C. for a meeting. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and I took a few minutes to go and see them.

---